


Medical Mysteries

by subtropicalStenella



Category: Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Blood and Gore, Broken Bones, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Finally the sexy happens, Hand Jobs, Head trauma, Hiding Medical Issues, Hurt/Comfort, Hyperventilation, I think I've made my point, Improper use of stimulants, Lots of nasty injuries, Major Character Injury, Medical Procedures, Mind Manipulation, Panic Attacks, Partial Mind Control, Pegging, Severe Burns, Sleep Deprivation, Soft Femdom, self sacrificing idiots, they're soldiers okay, wound care
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-03 10:54:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11530725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subtropicalStenella/pseuds/subtropicalStenella
Summary: Bly neglects to care for an combat injury because he's too busy being the Big Damn Hero and it's not THAT bad, really.... Oh wait, no, it's bad.(Set before NonRegulation Maneuvers, this is the incident where he ends up getting yelled at in a bathtub full of bacta)





	1. You Dense Motherfucker

Two fucking days and they're still hauling in wounded. The biggest thing since Geonosis and almost as much of a cockup. They're coming up with more bodies than breathers now, but there's still a few live carcasses to be scraped out of the rubble. He’s done, Swing Shift taking over the recovery. No one’s allowed to run doubles, on  _ his  _ orders, so he can't go out for more, no matter how much he wants to.   _ Needs _ to.

He's got someone with 501st Blue stripes draped across his shoulder, holding most of his weight off his shattered leg. Most of his weight in general, and trying very, very hard not to move anything on his own left side. He casts around the utter chaos of the nearest medical tent, looking for a face, a haircut, something he recognizes.

There. Three horizontal lines cut into the back of a fade, matching green stripes across his nose and cheekbones. “ _ Trio! _ ”

“About  _ fucking  _ time,” the medic snaps, shoving his way over, lifting the trooper’s lolling head. “What am I looking at?”

“Exposure, dehydration, multiple impact trauma. Looks like concussion rounds off an SBD. One to the shoulder, took the shoulder plate with it,” he rattles off, trying to keep the trooper up, his side screaming at him. “Another shattered the right femur, blacks about the only thing keeping the leg together.”

“Head trauma?”

“Not that I can tell. He's semiconscious. ”

Trio reaches under the trooper's helmet, starts popping seals. A long, ragged braid falls out the underside, the face streaked with the usual sweat and an unusual amount of color. Kohl and gold and more 501st Blue around the eyes, the lashes darkened. Warpaint.  _ Nice.  _ Something written across the cheek.

“‘Caliber’ huh? That you?”

A vague, possibly affirmative grunt.

“Rate, rank, number and name if you got one, Trooper,” Trio says, standard procedure (Mostly procedure, anyway. Obviously the bit about names was added on) to make sure a soldier’s brains haven't been turned completely to mush from impact trauma. Sometimes  _ meat cans  _ was too accurate a phrase.

The 501st doesn't respond, and there's a sharp  _ crack  _ as Trio slaps him across the face. “If you wanted to pass out, you should have thought of that earlier, shitlick. Sound off.”

“Fff. Fuck you.”

“Maybe later. Sound the fuck off,” Trio says, lifting the trooper’s chin up to look at his eyes. Pupils are mismatched and glassy, dried blood crusted under his nose.

“Heavy gunner, private,” he says grudgingly, only a little slurred. “CT-8752. Caliber.”

“Atta boy. Got a bitch of a concussion, too. Battalion?”

Caliber shakes his head and appears to regret it. “Girl. 501st Enth.”

Trio nods sharply, and yells back over his shoulder. “Stick, Poke! One of yours! She needs a bacta IV and probably a rebreak. Bacta first, the leg’s fucked.”

Two blue-striped medics come out of the crowd and haul Caliber off his shoulders. He tries not to wince and fails, but manages to suppress the groan as he hands her off. It feels like something is  _ tearing  _ all along his side. It's just a  _ burn.  _ A big, bad one, sure, but that felt. Wrong. It shouldn't hurt this bad.

But then again, he's also coming down off fifty-three straight hours awake, more than two thirds of which was brutal, live combat.

And graze or not, he got shot. By a droideka.  _ In the chest. _

 

_ … _

 

_ Fuck  _ he’s tired.

There's a medical kit in the barracks. And a refresher. Oh fuck, a refresher. Hell with the kit, he wants  _ that  _ more than anything. And  _ sleep _ .

He's done? Isn't he? He can't go out again. His shift is over. Orders.

“Hey!  _ Hey!  _ Where the fuck you think you're going?” Trio snarls, grabbing him by the shoulder. 

 

Ow ow  _ ow _

 

“My  _ rack,  _ jackwagon.”

“I’m not blind, and you can barely lift that arm--”

“Surface burns, I'll be fine,” he snaps, shaking Trio off and  _ leaving.  _ “There's dozens,  _ hundreds  _ of others worse off than I am and--”

Next thing he knows is he's on his back, sideways across a gurney with Trio’s forearm across his throat, the medic glaring down at him with the kind of wall-eyed, blown-pupil stare that says “I am running on piss, vinegar and five different kinds of stims of questionable legality so  _ do not fucking test me. _ ”

“And you're our  _ fucking _ Commander. I'm not going to be responsible for when whatever rancid nightmare you've got cooking underneath your blacks goes septic and eats your  _ fucking _ lung so with all due respect,  _ sir _ , either sit the fuck down or  _ so help me _ I will staple your dick to this fucking gurney. Sir.”

He _should_ bring Trio up on charges for that. Not only the back-talking, but threatening and _striking_ a Superior Officer should have him sent back to Kamino for recalibration, if not already in a _box_ to be recycled for parts.

Except Trio is right. And he knows where all that anger is coming from. The medics had it worst. Too many dead brothers under their hands and not enough sleep and so many other, worse things because their battle didn't stop when the shooting did. It’s either snap at his stubborn CO, his men, his assistants, or snap entirely and put his blaster in his mouth. So he tries to smile, and lets the smaller, Standard clone hold him down.

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” he says instead, and gets a harsh bark of laughter in response.

“I save all my best sweet talk for you, sir,” Trio says, and eases up, slapping the (good) side of his chestplate in an awkward apology.

“'S true,” someone in the next bed slurs. Catch's long forelock is hanging in his face, and not even the sexy way. He'll be so disappointed. “He  _ warns _ you, rest of us he just breaks out the suture gun--”

He tries to lift his splinted arm and sure enough, the upper sleeve of his blacks is stapled to the gurney cover.

“Fang, gimme a hand here--” Trio starts, flagging yet another medic, this one in the 104th’s extravagant grey.

“That's not necessa- _ ahk--! _ ” he starts, pulling himself awkwardly ( _ painfully _ ) up the gurney to sit up properly. He's cooperating, see?

“It is if you've got what I think you do under there,” Trio growls darkly, and starts unhooking his pauldron. “Get started on his chest plates, don't take it off without me, I want back and chest off in one piece.”

Fang starts popping fasteners, and each one  _ hurts,  _ pulling at his bad side. Trio chucks the pauldron up onto the end of the gurney and sets to work on his rerebraces, switching reaming Catch without even looking at him.

“ _You_ don't get a warning because you'd ignore it on account of you being the stupidest motherfucker I've ever had the indignity of working on, _and_ you decided to play grab-ass on Paws with your broken shitdamn _hand_.”

He looks over Trio’s shoulder to mouth  _ Thank you _ . Catch gives his trademark grin and takes the heat in stride.

“We don't even  _ have  _ mothers,” Catch points out indignantly, completely unrepentant.

“Just goes to show how much effort you're willing to put into ruining my day: you went and found some poor girl, convinced her to adopt me, a salty, grown ass man with a smoking habit in shitty gold-and-white plastoid composite, and then you fucked her,” Trio continues, without missing a beat.

Does he  _ practice  _ this shit or come up with it on the spot?

“And played grab-ass on  _ who  _ now?” Fang growls from somewhere in the vicinity of his armpit. Right, hadn't Wolffe said a couple of his boys had done that Old Mando marriage thing?

“Oh  _ shit _ ,” he starts, but his laugh cuts off into a pained  _ wheeze  _ as Trio gets fed up and just breaks the melted fastener off his side with a wrenching  _ crack.  _ His hand comes away with a blackened chunk of plastoid and a lot of crusted yellow and rusty-brown gunk that isn't dirt. Ah,  _ shit. _

“He'll just have to find some way to make it up to Fang later, won't he?” General Secura says, coming up through the chaos in a personal sea of calm to smooth Catch's curls back into an appealing configuration. She's gotten the bacta patch he'd slapped onto her side replaced with a fresh one and changed into a clean top, good.

“General, please, for the love of all the stars and little fucking fishes,  _ do not encourage him, _ ” Trio groans.

Too late, Fang is already giving Catch an appraising and frankly predatory once-over before resuming prying--actually  _ prying,  _ fuck, this is going to hurt, what is even going on--his chestplate off.

Catch seizes the General's hand in his good one, planting a loud kiss on the back with a flashbang-bright smile. “Sir, you are the  _ best  _ General.”

“Rein it in, hotshot,” Trio drawls.

“What’d  _ I  _ do?” someone yelps from three beds up and over.

“Not you, Eighty-Four,” Fang yells back, and looks up at Trio, hooking his fingers under the bottom edge of his chest- and backplates. “On three?”

Trio nods and sets his hands to mirror Fang’s, and it is _so much worse,_ fuck, something goes _squish_ against Trio’s fingers from under his blacks and sends an agonizing streak of fire racing all along his side, halfway down his leg.

“Brace yourself, Commander. One, two--”

He's not sure if they actually skip “three” or if it's just lost in the horrible,  _ squelching  _ crackle as they rip his armor open, making him hiss and swear fit to give Trio a run for his money as he breaks out in a cold sweat and tries not to black out, sucking air through gritted teeth.

“ _ Goddess,  _ what--? You told me it was 'just a graze’ Bly!” General Secura exclaims, starting forward.

“Probably was, at first,” Trio grouses, dumping the armor on the floor before kicking it under the gurney and out of the way. “ _ Now _ , it's the nasty, possibly infected result of letting a ruptured second- or third-degree burn fester inside filthy nanoprene with an accelerated healing factor for fuck only knows how long like a fucking  _ idiot. _ ”

He doesn't say anything, because yes, he's an idiot, it's  _ definitely  _ infected, he's been feverish for the last eighteen hours and trying to pretend it's just the stims. Fang peeling his blacks partway open is making little glowing sparks dance in his rapidly blurring vision and flooding his mouth with a surge of hot bile. Partially because there's blood, plasma and--yeah, that's definitely pus--in a delightful, half-coagulated horror show smeared all down his side and seeping into the legs of his blacks. Partially because  _ oh fuck this is what getting flayed feels like _ .

Breathe. Just breathe. Catch is keeping up a steady stream of distracting banter, bless the perverse bastard.

“You ever heard about this crazy thing called  _ getting laid _ ? Should try it sometime, might help keep your stress levels down.”

“ _ You _ ever heard about this crazy thing called  _ monogamy?  _ Should try it sometime, might help keep you from getting laid up with crotchrot again,” Trio replies, utterly deadpan.

“I  _ never!  _ You take that back, I--” Catch briefly forgets he's stapled in place in his attempt to salvage his reputation and nearly falls off the gurney. He waves to get Fang’s attention. “Look, it was  _ one time  _ and it was a false alarm. She was Mirialan, there was pollen involved, I panicked.”

_ fuck fuck oh fuck laughing hurts fuck _

Fang has to stop what he's doing and crack up laughing, close to  _ actually _ cracking as he scrubs his eyes on his wrists to keep his gloves relatively clean. It takes a solid thirty seconds for Fang to be able to continue pulling his right sleeve down and off as carefully as he can, pulling it around his back to give Trio more slack to work with as he tries the left side. Trio doesn't get very far before it turns out that he can't lift his arm to pull it out of the sleeve, not without tearing something.

“ _Shit,_ ” he snaps, then looks up and whistles sharply through his teeth. “Patches! You still got my shears!”

“And?”

“You want to give them  _ back  _ anytime soon?”

“Not with  _ that _ attitude.”

Jab slaps another set into Trio’s hand as he walks by with an armload of spent bacta patches, before he can fire off another volley of invective. “Take mine and some damn antacids, ya prick.”

“Fuck yourself,” Trios says by way of thanks, and sets to work slicing through the sleeve of his blacks, into his armpit and down his side. The normally soft, flexible nanoprene  _ crunches  _ between the shears as Trio works down to the worst part, and even as careful as he's being--Trio talked a lot of smack but he was  _ utterly  _ devoted to caring for his patients as thoroughly and safely as possible--something cracks and  _ tears  _ horribly where skin and fabric meet, and it's not the nanoprene.

He slams his fist down onto the gurney with an agonized grunt, chewing on his tongue and trying to hold still as Trio cusses up a blue streak and changes direction, cutting around the section of nanoprene apparently cemented to his fucking side. 

He  _ really  _ doesn't want to know the color of whatever fluid just started oozing down his ribs. Especially with the way it's making Trio hiss and swear, pressing the ragged, sticky fabric back onto his side. “ _ Shiiiiiiiit.  _ This isn't coming off without taking a chunk of you with it.”

Trio scrubs the back of his wrist over his forehead and sighs. “Paws, Stick? We still SOL on tanks?” he yells, with a look like he already knows the answer.

The derisive howls of laughter confirms it, but even if there had been-- “I don't need a fucking  _ tank _ , Trioo _ hhshit-- _ ”

He cuts off in a wheeze when Trio jams his knuckles into his bad side. “Either we soak it off or we  _ rip  _ it off, and forgive me for preferring to keep your sorry hide in one piece. Lucky for your stupid, self-sacrificing ass, we get to do it the hard way.”

Trio claps him on the shoulder with a lot of vicious cheer, and turns back to Fang. “Tranq him and--”

He shakes his head, swallows roughly. “Local. Can't knock me out.”

“Sir you  _ do not  _ want to see what your ribcage looks like on the inside and you  _ will _ if you're up and kicking,” Fang warns, and preps an anaesthetic hypo anyway.

“No, dammit. Put me down and I'm not coming back up for a week.”

“Mixed drinks?” Trio asks, referring to the wide variety of pharmaceutical enhancements available to the troops, whether the Republic knew it or not.

He nods. “Three and a half hours ago. Two greens, a red and a handful of uppers.” All legal, all Republic Issue, but definitely not supposed to be taken within four to six hours of each other, let alone together.

“Well,  _ shit, _ ” Fang spits, and sucks air through his teeth. Trio shrugs.

“Alright, your nightmares, then,” he says, and starts rummaging for clean scalpel.

“ _ Wait _ \--Goddess, for pity's sake,  _ wait! _ ” General Secura says, breaking her silence. They all look up, a little startled, like they'd forgotten she was there. She has Catch's good hand in a death grip. He doesn't seem to mind.

“Sir?”

“You said you could soak it off, right? Does it have to be in a tank?”

Trio shrugs. “Could do it in a bucket if you could find one big enough.”

“Stick him in a shipping crate, maybe?" Fang offers.

“You're not going to stick me in a damn  _ shipping crate _ \--”

“Of course they aren't, they're going to stick you in my bathtub,” General Secura says serenely.

“What?"

Trio cracks up  _ with _ Fang this time, two parts exhausted hysterics, one part genuine. “ _ Damn  _ it's good to be on top. Yeah, that'll work. Take--”

He cuts off, staring at the entrance as something like a dozen troopers stagger in, every last one of them streaked black with soot and scorch marks, some of them still actively smoking.

“You fucking  _ asshole _ !” Hard to say who he's yelling at, none of them have anything distinctive yet, but their shoulder plates show them as 41st Aurek and Besh. One of them hauls off his helmet, all smiles, sunshine and bubbles, to shout, “ _ We blew up a tank! _ ”

“And your fucking  _ Sergeant  _ with it?!” Trio snarls, shoving his way through to rip the green-striped helmet off the trooper slumped between two of his men, “What’d he do, shove a grenade up the tailpipe by hand and follow it up with his  _ dick? _ ”

He's pretty sure Bubbles answered “Yes” to that, and it's terrifying, even if the Sergeant is shaking his head and slurring something about an indecency demerit. Troopers still worried about that? Trio has completely forgotten about him anyway.

Fang is shoving four two-liter bags of raw bacta into the General's arms and another two into his as someone else comes up behind him and shoves him and Catch right off their respective gurneys, Catch hastily cutting himself free with a beltknife. Looks like Swing Shift got lucky, stumbling onto the whole mess of the missing 41st Elite at once after they'd apparently done something typically insane. For all the 212th and 501st were famous for their big targets and impossible odds, the 41st was picking up a name for low level targets in  _ incredibly _ high quantities, ripping through the battlefields like a plague.

“Two of those in blood-warm water,  _ not _ hot, clean the worst of the mess off and let him soak a bit,” Fang says, ripping off the used gurney covers and replacing them without pausing in his lecture. Catch takes the results and shoves them down a laundry chute with his good hand, walking wounded taking over minor duties to take the heat off the medics. They weren't trained to do that. Medics were expected to handle everything, but they'd picked it up on their own and it was a literal lifesaver. “Drain the waste off once things start to come loose, then refill with the rest of the bacta in warm water again.  _ Keep the injury submerged.  _ Questions? No? Good.  _ Out. _ ”

 

He's almost pathetically grateful that Fang has given the General something to carry, because he's absolutely certain that otherwise, she'd be carrying  _ him.  _ Not that he needs carrying, he's perfectly capable of walking. Just… not in a straight line. And maybe his leg is starting to remind him that “not actually broken” and “capable of supporting his weight” does not necessarily mean “uninjured”. And maybe a dull ache is slowly creeping into his bones, pure fatigue compounded by the usual minor injuries. A few bumps and bruises and hard knocks. Possibly an ache in his wrists from pistol recoil, a heavy throb in his shoulder from the repeated impact of his rifle butt, despite his armor and proper handling. The persistent headache from processing too much information from his HUD too fast for too long. Soreness in his neck and back and knees and the arches of his fuckdamn  _ feet  _ just from being on them and moving for most of three days.

He knows most of it is just his body recognizing that he's out of danger, safe enough to process all the hell he's put it through. You're safe, you're alive, you're in for a  _ world  _ of hurt. Doesn't mean he doesn't hate it.

All of that, combined with the effects of exhaustion and stim-crash, means he doesn't exactly register when they make it back into the barracks, then back to the General's suite. At that point, he's mostly just following all three of her swaying lekku wherever they lead him and hoping to hell and back that he gets somewhere he can sit down before he falls down.

There's a very small part of him that's quite proud that he doesn't collapse until after General Secura secures the door behind him, the part that isn't utterly disgusted that he's collapsing at all. In his defense, it's not even a  _ collapse  _ so much as a physical acquaintance with the back of the General’s desk chair, which is gracious enough to support his weight when his bad leg decides it doesn't want to anymore. Unfortunately his free hand is on his bad side, which is even less happy with him than his leg, and doesn't want to cooperate with the General’s chair in holding him up. There's a series of heavy  _ thwaps  _ he assumes is his armload of bacta falling to the ground, but it's still tucked against his side, which means it's probably  _ him  _ hitting the ground and he just hasn't caught up with the scenario.

No, there's definitely bacta bags flopping onto the floor. So. Where. Oh. The General dropped  _ hers _ , and is trying to make him let go of his so she can tuck herself under his arm, hold him up, no no no she's doing it wrong she's going to squash her lekku under his arm, he's too heavy, he--

“I’m not made of  _ glass,  _ Bly,” she grumbles, but she flips her lekku out from under his arm anyway before shoving her shoulder into his armpit, hoisting him up and taking most of his weight on her shoulders. There's none of the strange, not-quite-itching warmth on his skin that would indicate she's using the Force to do it either, apparently determined to out-stubborn him.

 

_ Light  _ he loves her.

 

Her lekku twitch abruptly and she very nearly stumbles when his legs only marginally cooperate and her bare shoulder slips out from under his arm. She must not have expected him to fall apart on her. He shouldn't have, and now she'll smell like three-day-old battle sweat and blood and pus too.

“It's not like I've been able to hit the fresher either, Bly,” she laughs, but it might be a little forced. He doesn't mind, he’s aware of how disgusting he is. “Come on then.”

He staggers along with her, his boots dragging, until she can get him into the back room, all fancy stone tile and shiny fixtures, a big ceramic basin (with  _ paws _ why does it have paws) in one corner. She dumps him onto the side of the basin, wedging his shoulder into the wall to prop him upright and wincing when he lets out a pained grunt in the process, before she leans down and starts unbuckling his cuisses.

He reaches for her hands with his good one, watching her struggle with the dirt-and-worse-caked fasteners. “Sir, I can--”

She slaps his fingers away and pulls off the left one, holding in her irritation just long enough to avoid pulling him out of his seat, but she heaves the thick plastoid into the far corner with more force and more Force than necessary. “I know you can. You’re not going to, because you've done enough.”

“Sir--”

“You have  _ done enough, _ ” she says, meeting and holding his gaze, the edge of Command in her voice, and he drops back against the wall with a shuddering sigh. It doesn't count as falling apart, as  _ failing _ , if he's doing what he's told.

He's still going to help, holding the tatters of his top against his oozing side and popping the fasteners on his cod and skidplate, shifting carefully to get the latter out from under him and shove it aside. She starts frowning as soon as he reaches for the first buckle, and outright scowls at him when he can't hold in a pained grunt as he moves. He let her do his cuisses, greaves  _ and  _ boots  _ and  _ bootliners but he's not an invalid, dammit. He's  _ also  _ going to be the one to undo his blacks, because while she's seen him naked on more than one occasion, getting into his pants, even for completely professional reasons, is a whole other cache of ammunition.

She beats him to the punch and gets her hands on his waistband and all the delightful crusted cocktail of bodily fluids  _ that  _ entails, and he has to swat  _ her  _ hands away, because dammit if someone's taking his pants off they aren't going to be scowling about it.

Why is she laughing?

Aw hell, he said that aloud didn't he. Fuckssakes what else has he been blithering on about?

“Sorry, sir. That… came out wrong,” he mutters, and tries to push his blacks down one-handed.

“Sounded like a perfectly reasonable mentality to  me,” she giggles, and reaches up to help. He lets her, because technically she passed qualifications: she's not scowling anymore. Besides which, the nanoprene is stuck to his hip, but not nearly so bad as his side, more like peeling off a bacta-patch. He does lose a little hair below the belt and he has to hang onto the edge of the basin when she pulls them off his legs, lest his sweaty ass slide right off the side, but all things considered, he doesn't mind. He's too busy leaning back against the blessedly cool tile and trying not to let exhaustion knock him out entirely while she goes to retrieve the bacta. If he lifts his leg up and over the side, he can sort of… slide into the--

Or fall sideways down into and onto incredibly hard, unforgiving porcelain with a lot of very tired, resigned cursing, cracking his head and shoulder and hand on various expensive surfaces, his elbow on a fixture, starting cold water pouring down onto his stomach, his legs still kicked over the side. There's a series of  _ splacks  _ and a call of  _ “Bly?!” _ from the front room as the General drops the bacta again and actually  _ runs  _ back in, leaning against the doorway with a sigh as she watches him attempt to lever himself upright again. “ _ Blast  _ it, Bly, will you just let me  _ help  _ you?”  

“'m sorry, sir,” he slurs, trying to push himself up and over to the sloped end of the basin and hold his top against his side. It doesn't work terribly well, because he's pretty sure it should involve pulling his legs in, but twisting that way is a Bad Idea.

She sighs sadly and carefully lifts his legs into the basin before fiddling with another spigot until warmer water pours out onto his feet, turning reddish-brown as it runs down the drain. It was amazing how much dirt got through their blacks, how well they held blood. Not that he'd bled much, most of his injuries were bruises. The leg that had nearly gotten crushed under their flipped transport was going to be a beautiful rainbow from midthigh down, the worst of it just below his knee. He still wasn't entirely sure if it wasn't broken, but at least it wasn't doing that thing where a ruptured vessel under the skin makes a big nasty swollen spot of potentially lethal, nerve-destroying hemorrhage they’d have to cut open to release pressure. If General Secura hadn't held the majority of the weight off them with the sheer strength of her will, he'd have lost it entirely, and Razor… if the crash didn't kill him outright, Requisitions wouldn't have been able to issue prosthetics for the kind of fucked up he would have been, and there'd have been a lot more deaths besides.

Might be part of why his back hurt so much, she'd kept the transport off them, but he'd still been a living shield for her when the first rockets hit.

The water is still going down the drain, after it runs over her hand and down his legs. They're supposed to soak him. He's not soaking.

“'m not soakin.”

“No, not yet,” she answers soothingly. She always sounds soothing. Jedi were highly skilled at sounding completely calm and reasonable in the face of others' screaming tantrums, but she had the gift of doing so without the biting edge of sarcasm most of them had. She could make a Senator, a _Prince_ , once, feel like an idiot child and then _sincerely apologise_ for being an idiot child and it was absolutely _hilarious._ Their helmets were a blessing. She'd never be able to pull it off if said aristocrat were able to see the way her battalion was completely _losing its shit_ over the coms in mockery. He rarely commented, but he kept his receiving mic on so the boys could get a live stream. She's _capable_ of raising her voice, but never does. Well, once she cut loose in a _blistering_ tirade at a refugee slaver who'd wanted to leave his “stock” behind in an attempt to increase speed on their extraction from a hotzone. He’d only caught a fraction of what she was saying, since most of it was in Ryl, but it was just as beautiful as her speaking voice, in a different way.

“Because you're filthy and I thought you would prefer not to stew in your own sweat and blood,” she continues, bringing him back to reality with  her chin in her hand, her elbow on the basin near his, where he has it cocked out sideways to keep his top in place. He'd considered pulling one of the sleeves into his lap to cover his junk, but eh, she's seen it all before and it's not as if he's anything worth looking at, especially now, half stoned out of his head with exhaustion and stimcrash and purple in more places than brown.

“Oh. Yeah. No.” This is why they have Generals, probably.

She reaches down next to the basin, comes up with a pitcher of some sort, and plunks it between his feet and shins to catch the warm water pouring out of the spigot. He doesn't  _ quite  _ fit all the way in, his legs bent up and knocking against the sides of the basin.

“Sorry, no sprayer attachment, I think they expected me to have servants or something,” she says and upends the pitcher over his chest, sending more dirt and blood and worse things both crusty  _ and  _ slimy swirling down the drain. The pitcher is shaped like a fish, and the spout is its open mouth. This is supposed to be elegant? He starts laughing quietly, trying to restrain himself because it still hurts, and the General Secura looks utterly baffled, which doesn't help, especially since her lekku make little confused loopty-loops behind her.

“Servants t’make a fish throw up on you? Classy.”

She informs him that he's completely disgusting, but she's laughing as she dumps the next bit over his head, making him sputter.

It's  _ almost  _ nice enough for it not to be weird, but having his General wait on him--especially since she specifically said this was considered  _ servants’ work _ , pouring more clean warm water over his battered, apparently structurally inadequate body--is making his brain itch, so when she leans in to sluice a particularly stubborn smear of awful off his chest with her hands, he stops her and does it himself. She pulls back, shoulders tense and lekku twitching like she's uncomfortable, but he doesn't know how to explain that she hasn't done anything wrong as she stoppers the drain, careful not to touch him. It's not that he doesn't want her to touch him, it's just… he’s… She's  _ better  _ than this, he's not… She shouldn't… He's a tube-grown piece of meat and bones in shitty gold-and-white plastoid composite. Being cared for like he's more than that, especially by someone who isn't the same thing, is  _ weird  _ and uncomfortable in a way he can't place. It's in the same category of wanting things he can't have that, well, the General herself is in.

She sighs through her nose, somewhere between sad and irritated. “You deserve nice things too, you know.”

He's too tired to get into an argument he knows he'll lose, and tries to settle back a little in the water, which is now up over his hips. It's nice on its own, and feels a little nostalgic, like he's back on Kamino. He fit in a tube, at least. The General is talking again, and he opens his eyes, previously unaware that he'd closed them, and that's Bad. At least the General is here to keep watch, he supposed. They're safe enough that it's probably not  _ that  _ bad that he's slipping.

“In fact, here--” she holds up a large, wax-and-ribbon-sealed jar of… what is that, little colored rocks? Bits of gravel? Why is some of it sparkly? Who would  _ gild  _ rocks?

Luckily either she's doing the Jedi Mind Reading Thing or he looks sufficiently confused, so she explains. “Fancy salt. Good for most species’ skin and it smells nice.  _ Blackberry Hibiscus Champagne _ , apparently.”

“ _ Why? _ ”

“Because at six hundred credits an ounce on Senator Mireen's tab,  _ someone  _ should enjoy it,” she says, and unceremoniously dumps half the jar and subsequently something like a quarter of a million credits onto his stomach. It does smell nice, but--

“Uh…”

“It's  _ also  _ going to turn the water into very expensive saline, which means it'll help dissolve the mess you've made of your side a little easier.” 

 

He can't argue with that.

 

“Also I'm almost entirely certain the Senator gave it to me because he wants to get into my pants, and it'll  _ infuriate  _ him when I tell him I ‘ _ wasted’ _ it on a clone,” she growls vindictively, smirking.

“Shit, if that's the case, get in here with me,” he says, because _ Mental filter? What's that?  _ Apparently he stunted the development of his somehow. A longneck dropped him on his head when they fished him out of his gestation tube. He slaps his free hand over his face. “Please ignore me, ‘m pretty sure’m exhausted enough t’be some level of mentally incapacitated.”

“You're also very funny, especially when you’re too tired or annoyed to worry about propriety,” she says, smiling like soft early sunrise, and then it turns mischievous and blazing as a Tattooine double-noon.

“Goddess, can you imagine his  _ face?  _ 'Thank you  _ ever so much _ for the luxury gift that could have bought several pieces of essential hospital equipment. My Clone Commander, the War Hero and  _ far _ more attractive example of Human Masculinity, and I  _ greatly  _ appreciated it.’” she lilts, snickering as she slits a bacta bag and dumps the gooey contents in, pouring it over his bad side especially.

“S’not like that's a high bar t’pass,” he says, and slowly, carefully shifts to try and lift his arm over his head and out of the way. It still hurts and he still winces, but already it feels less like he's trying to rip his own hide off if he does it very, very slowly. “Pretty sure I can break him in half without breakin a sweat. Weedy lil inbred prick.”

She  _ did  _ say she liked it when he was mouthy, and sure enough, she snickers. If he tucks his forearm behind his head, he can get to something resembling  _ comfortable _ when he slides down further in the water and gives up entirely on fitting both his legs in, opting to kick his good leg up over the side. His bad knee  _ does not  _ want to bend, but letting it stiffen up straight would be worse. She watches him do so with a resumed scowl, but what else is he supposed to do? Also his side is completely under the bacta broth now. Heh, with the salt, he really is  _ stewing. _

“When's the last time you ate, or drank anything that wasn't through a pipe built into your kit?” she asks, with an air like she already has a fairly accurate estimate from experience and doesn't like it. “And stims don't count.”

Long enough that he would literally kill for fresh, non-reclaimed water, and she  _ definitely _ won't like the answer. He winces preemptively, blowing air out on a sigh. “Fifteen hours? Sixteen?”

She continues scowling, and might actually growl at him before she leaves, warning him not to drown while she's gone. He's… reasonably certain he can manage that. All he has to do is just… not move for a while, which is exactly what every fiber of his being wants to do, and the bacta is starting to work its magic, warmth seeping into his skin above even the temperature of the water. He closes his eyes on a heavy sigh, just for a second


	2. You Absolute Disaster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Buckle up kiddos, this is where shit gets intense

… There's a hand on his head, petting his hair. Thin fingers with nails he can feel scritching at his scalp, not chewed- or clipped down to wear thick armored gauntlets comfortably, and it feels  _ unspeakably _ good. Enough that he's reluctant to open his eyes again, because she'll probably stop.

“As much as I hate to wake you, we should probably take a look at your side,” she murmurs, crouching down and watching him blink blearily at her. His hand has fallen asleep, and the water is closer to tepid than comfortably warm.  _ Shit. _

“How long was I out?” he mumbles, sitting up and flexing his fingers to get the feeling back. It’s slightly worrying that his internal clock is still fucked over enough that he can't immediately tell. Her hand shifting down to his chest keeps him from moving much, which is probably for the best. His side has decided to remind him that he's an idiot.

“Only an hour,” she assures him, and crosses her arms on the edge of the basin. “You needed it. It's like you haven't slept at all these last few days.”

He huffs a rueful chuckle through his nose. “Was kinda busy, with th’War Effort an all.”

She sits up abruptly, and her lekku do one of the few things he recognizes, the rippling flex that means  _ alarm alarm bad bad bad _

“Not at all?! For  _ three days?! _ ” she exclaims,  _ appalled, _ like he's done something wrong. Which, no, excuse  _ her, _ he hasn't.

“Two and a half, and  _ neither have you, _ ” he snaps back, because if she's allowed to get mad about it, so is he. Besides, he did several solid five-day cycles without sleep in training, they all did, per Standards, and as a result he knew he'd be fine. Brain damage hadn't set in until at least ten days awake in the initial batch trials. He'd only ever lost something like two percent of his proficiency scores in his trials, and then only  _ after  _ he'd hit the five-day mark.

“Wh--I--You--!”

Did he just make her  _ stammer?  _ Wow. Wait, no, not wow, she's yelling at him.

“I have  _ so!  _ What did you  _ think  _ I was doing when we holed up in ditches and warehouses and-and-and  _ whatever _ we could find for shelter?! Sitting around with my eyes closed for nothing?!” 

 

Her hands move almost as much as her lekku when she gets going, huh.

 

“Meditating?” Shrugging still hurts but not quite so much as an hour ago. Hooray.

“I--Well,  _ yes,  _ but also  _ power napping,  _ Goddess’ sake I  _ know  _ you're capable of doing it, I've  _ watched  _ you--”

She stops suddenly, mid-gesture. It's kind of adorable but she might deck him for saying so.

“... You never sleep in the field when I do,” she says, in tones of dawning horror.

“No?”

“You just steal scraps of time between watches, you're  _ always  _ keeping watch when I sleep.”

“Yes?” Is she  _ just now  _ figuring this out?

“So when I apparently didn't sleep at all, you…”

“Had to keep up, yeah.”

She gapes at him a bit,  _ horrified _ . Which makes no sense, because he's Exceeded Expectations for his class of clone, that's a  _ good _ thing.

“Bly, you--Goddess, I'm a  _ Jedi _ , I can literally tap into the fabric of the universe for strength, for energy, I threw a transport with my  _ mind  _ yesterday _ , _ I'm the closest thing to  _ unstoppable  _ in the Galaxy! You physically  _ can't  _ keep up with me! You will  _ kill yourself  _ trying!”

“Pulled it off anyway,” he says, and he  _ might  _ possibly be grinning like the smug, cocky idiot he generally tries not to be, but hey, he  _ is  _ the very best of Kaminoan genetic engineering, pride of the GAR. It's  _ Command _ stock, not Command-ER and Command-O, after all.

She's still gaping at him,  _ harder _ somehow, a muscle twitching under her eye. Did he  _ break  _ her?

Nope, she's fine enough to slap the water with an infuriated, disgusted noise that  _ might  _ possibly be akin to a shriek in a less dignified person, and subsequently throws a small tidal wave of bacta in his face. He really, really shouldn't be laughing when she's this upset and it's probably mostly the return of exhausted hysteria but here they were.

“Don't you _ever_ do something like this again,” she snarls, and reaches down between his knees, _entirely too quickly_ _and angrily_ for his preferences, to wrench the stopper out of the drain. “Do you understand me? You can't fucking well have my back if you're having a bleeding _heart attack,_ blast and _damn it it all!”_ She throws the soft rubber stopper into the wall and makes it crack a tile.

_ And  _ he made her curse in Basic, that's a Battalion First, as far as he knows. He'd be perversely proud of that but she's  _ genuinely upset _ , about  _ him _ , no less, and that's precisely the opposite of what he wants, so he reaches for her hand, pulling it down to his chest. He flattens her palm over his heart, covering her hand with his.

“I'm  _ fine,  _ see? Just a little elevated, probably at around eighty beats per minute,” he says, watching her carefully. Her lekku are still twitching back and forth like irritated cats’ tails but she's not throwing things anymore, just staring at their hands as the water drains away. “I'll drop back down to somewhere around forty in another hour or so, once the last of the stims fade out. Check my vitals later if you can find my bucket. I topped out at two-twenty-one during the worst of it and not a single arrhythmic spike, stutter or murmur. Promise.”

“That doesn't excuse the deliberate sleep deprivation,” she grumbles, and hands him a large  _ glass _ bottle of water from the Senator-provided “supplies”. Rich people, honestly. She’s still annoyed at him, but he knows he's won, especially since…

“If you say  _ one word  _ about Training Standards, I will drown you in this bathtub,” she growls warningly, and he shuts up and drinks his water, which, despite the fancy packaging, is still just  _ water.  _ Imported from Alderaan, according to the label. Fuck’s sake,  _ why? _ The water on this planet was almost entirely fresh  _ and _ potable anyway.

She wouldn't drown him, obviously, but he knows when to drop an argument:  _ now _ , before she realizes he just neatly sidestepped her well-meaning but ill-advised demand that he not give his all to keep her safe. Besides, she's taking the empty bottle back, reaching for the disgusting, painful disaster that is his burned side and he's going to need to focus on things like  _ Don't Pass Out, You Fucking Whiner _

“Yessir,” he says, and carefully raises his arm again, hissing through gritted teeth as he feels the fabric start to pull away already, weighted down by absorbed water. Her hands immediately go to his side, holding the remains of his top in place with one and coming up with a set of medical shears of her own in the other, cutting away the slack in chunks. It's significantly easier now than when Trio was trying to cut through the gore-stiffened material, but now he has to focus on staying conscious while she actively pushes and pulls on the injury, blood trickling thinly down his side as she works. Unfortunately she looks up just in time to catch him biting down on the meaty part of his forearm to stay conscious and  _ quiet _ , and she nearly stabs him in the ribs with the shears in her haste to swat his hand away and replace it with a piece of rolled up nanoprene. It tastes awful, salt and blood and spent bacta, but he can actually bite down properly, hands fisted behind his head.

“You should have let Fang dope you up before we left,” she informs him as she pulls carefully at the places where nanoprene is adhered to his side, scab and already some fragile scar tissue in a couple spots, looking for a loose place to start.

“Mrrn ff,” he says, which is kinda stupid but if he  _ thinks  _ 'It would have  _ worn off _ by now’ hard enough at her, she'll get the idea, right?

“Well then  _ I  _ should have gotten a few hypos before we left, because the only thing we have for an analgesic that won't react badly to the bacta is  _ more bacta _ ,” she says, running her fingers along one of the many angry red lines of infection that spread up onto his chest. It's already receding, the inflammation dying to the bacta.

He shrugs his good shoulder. It’s better than nothing, that's for damned sure, and far from the worst he's had, especially if he doesn't count training damage. Combat injuries alone included the scar on low on his bicep where the bone of his snapped elbow had gone right through the skin and very nearly through his nanoprene. He had needed to push that back inside by hand and then strap his arm to his chest with ventilation tape until he could get himself to a proper tank. Fucking  _ Vos.  _ Sure  as shit didn't have painkillers then beyond fucking  _ adrenaline.  _ And then he had to wait more than a damned  _ week  _ to get a new rerebrace issued in his size.

She finds somewhere loose enough to work with and slathers it with the bacta concentrate, carefully running her fingertips over the seam of skin and fabric, pressing them apart.

If she's still reading his mind, it's nothing interesting. A lot of swearing that doesn't even have the decency to be  _ creative _ , just assorted tenses of  _ shit  _ and  _ fuck _ tumbling over and around  _ breathe, just breathe _ . Long deep breaths through his nose and out his teeth around the nanoprene. It's definitely a good thing she gagged him, he'd either be howling or chewing through his arm.

“Oh for--Damn it, Bly, drop the machismo, it's just the two of us, no one's going to hear you _actually_ _acknowledge_ that you're in pain,” she grouses.

One, it's not machismo, it's  _ survival instinct _ , and two, hearing him scream is just going to make her more upset and add to the nightmares he knew she had about her boys. So he pretends the way she just pulled a couple centimeters of his skin off his ribs hurt too much for him to hear her. He doesn't have to pretend very hard, because the problem with their carefully engineered accelerated healing factor meant that a third degree burn, (which by definition reduced the area to little more than crisped skin, cooked meat and dead nerve endings) didn’t stay that way for long, and grew those nerves back  _ real  _ quick, along with tender new skin.

She pauses to knock the faucet back on with her elbow, rinsing her hand off and putting the fish pitcher back under it. He gets a bit of a reprieve while it fills, and tries not to think about the blood and fuck knows what else staining the pristine white porcelain, his eyes squeezed shut hard enough to give him a headache. Well. To intensify the one he already had.

The water temperature is no different from before, but pouring into an open injury is a whole different experience, making him tense up and whimper, gripping the edge of the basin behind his head and now  _ she  _ tenses up, pushing at the cold water lever with her elbow. “ _ Blast  _ it, I'm sorry, it's too hot, I forget, I'm so sorry, you run hotter than I do, I overestimated, I’m sorry--!”

“Ish fffn,” he hisses, cutting her off. It was, really. Cold water probably would have been just as bad, the flow of either one would have pulled at the injury, which was the real problem.

“You--!  _ Urghhh. _ ”

 

Yes, he knows, she's told him. More than once.

 

He can't precisely tell how far along she is, his side one long ugly stretch of several different, equally unpleasant varieties of pain, but she stops him with a slimy hand on his chest when he starts to look down. “No, Fang was right, you don't want to see this.”

He nods shortly and lets his head fall back on his arms, trying to breathe slowly. If he breathes slow she can work easier, rather than trying to compensate for the jackrab stutter of agonized panting. Hell, she can just pull against the rise and fall of his chest, and he can try not to think about the fact that he can hear his skin  _ literally peeling off. _ Ohhhh fuck everything, he's going to be sick.

He swallows hard to stave it off, stomach heaving, tensing and turning away from her as he fights the impulse. Water splashes over his stomach from the spigot as she plunges her hands into the stream to clean them. One blessedly cool hand ends up across his forehead, the other on his stomach, and it… helps. Somehow. The nausea fades as abruptly as it occurred, her hands soft points of stillness over his roiling guts and spinning head. It steadies him enough that he actually relaxes a little, leaning into her touch until she pulls the gag out of his mouth, letting him stretch and flex his jaw. She picks up another water bottle while he does, but pulls it away before he can even do more than twitch in the general direction of possibly taking it from her. Right. He's supposed to let her help him. He stays where he is, hands behind and supporting his head, and she gives him more (clean,  _ cold _ ) water to clear the last taste of suppressed bile from his mouth.

“Do you need a break?” she asks quietly. Her hand is still on his stomach, cool and soft and grounding. He shakes his head slowly. He's as close to fine as he can be, given the situation, and as far as he's concerned, the sooner this is over, the better, but…

“Do you?” he asks, a little hoarse, and she flushes slightly.  _ Damn _ . He drops the hand on his good side down to hers, he hadn't meant--

“I'll be fine,” she answers softly, and squeezes his fingers gently. She needs her hand back, obviously, but he doesn't particularly want to let her go. Having benign contact is… really,  _ really  _ nice right now, but knowing his luck (and reflexes) there's a decent chance he'd hurt her, crush her hand in his. Not that she was  _ weak _ , or anything, not with callus and muscle like  _ that _ , but her bones were so thin and graceful, and even with her species’ higher collagen/cartilage content, he worried. She takes her hand back, fingertips dragging over his stomach as she sits up to push the wad of nanoprene back into his mouth, then farther still to press a soft kiss to his forehead, sighing heavily like it's an apology.

He doesn't know how to respond to that. Or the fact that she just kissed him. Normally that wouldn't be an issue, she was very joyfully physically affectionate, especially in victory, throwing out hugs and backslaps and kisses as much as any of the boys. Hell, the lipstick-print above the right side of Catch's visor was hers, painstakingly copied in paint. One of the most treasured holos in the Battalion collection was the General with her arms slung around a tangle of pilots, hoisting all of them into the air on a group hug after they'd taken out some ridiculous target that had since blended in to the rest of the ridiculous targets before and after.

She'd cheated a little. She hadn't quite been able to reach her arms around  _ all _ of them and ultimately used the Force to get Gunner up with Mids and Anomaly. They'd very carefully kept the image off the main Holonet to preserve her Jedi Mystique but honestly, they were almost all like that, when no one could see them but their boys.

  * General Mace “Manually Deadlift Commander Ponds Over My Head To Prove A Point” Windu
  * General Obi-Wan “If It Has A Pulse I'll Flirt With It” Kenobi
  * General Plo “Don’t Talk To Me Or My Several Hundred Sons Ever Again” Koon
  * General Luminara “Knows More Dick Jokes Than You” Unduli
  * Commander Ahsoka “Scale Captain Rex Like A Tree To Feel Suitably Tall While Back-Talking General Anakin 'Hold My Drink And Watch This’ Skywalker” Tano. 
  * Etc.



But this was different. Her lips lingered on his skin a moment, and part of him wants to stop her, keep the sour taste of pain-and-fear sweat from her mouth when she licks her lips after, a nervous gesture in anyone else that he can't interpret on her, not when her lekku aren't saying she's nervous, the tips curled ever so slightly up instead. She followed it up by pressing her forehead against his, a different sort of kiss that makes his chest hurt. Not his side, but more towards the center, and he's not going to think about why.

Of course, whatever illicitly pleasant calm he got out of the moment was thoroughly ruined by the fact that she really needed to get back to peeling him like an overripe kavasa. Complete with squishy rotten spots! 

 

Don't throw up.

 

Fuck's sake, now he's not going to be able to eat any fresh fruit they manage to get in the ration rotation  _ or  _ black market for the next… ever. Probably the next _ ever.  _ Ugh _. _

She's able to work a little faster now, having figured out a sort of technique with the cadence of his breathing that lets her detach nanoprene from flesh in sections. On the one hand, hooray, it'll be over soon. On the other hand, he's going to have more bruises on  _ his _ hand from slamming it into the basin in an attempt to grab the side edge, his fingers are going numb from his grip, and he's not able to entirely contain the broken, animalistic noises building up in his chest and throat anymore.

The lek that had sort of… flopped onto his shoulder when she leaned over him has ended up coiled around his raised bicep. He wasn't aware they were  _ that  _ prehensile, hers mostly just twitch, but he'd long suspected the strappy harness thing restrained them anyway, and she had apparently taken that off while he'd been passed out like a useless sack of sand ballast earlier. He's not entirely sure why it decided to coil up, it's restricting her range of movement, hanging onto him like this, but he has to admit, it's… weirdly nice? Her skin is so damned  _ soft,  _ completely different from humans’, poreless and cool and dry, and she didn't seem to mind his gross sweaty face on her skin before, so he turns his head and hides the agonized expressions and involuntary noises in the softness of her lekku and tries not to squash it between his arm and his stupid thick skull.

“Almost…  _ there! _ ”

He lets out a huge, groaning sigh of relief through his nose, his head falling back against the basin to  _ thunk  _ loudly, as the pain varieties are reduced by One (1): no more stretching, tearing sensation. Hooray. He still has 

  * torn muscle ache, 
  * torn _skin_ ache (which is unsubtly different), 
  * exposed nerve burning, 
  * infection burning, 
  * chemical-reaction burning, 
  * dry-air-on-open-injury itch, 



and a couple others he can't quite identify, but hey, one down.

Oh  _ fuck fuck fuck  _ the “someone is actually, physically touching the open injury” variety is back and he makes the mistake of looking down. She's--oh  _ fuck, why did he look?! _ \--smearing bacta gel onto his side, where the depth of the burn vs the thinness of his skin and subsequently the amount of dead flesh pulled away means she's actually touching _ bone  _ in a couple places and and and--

And she slaps him in the chest to stop the high, panicked noises coming out of somewhere that might be him, possibly, he's not entirely sure where his body is right now, but there's a hand closing around and under his jaw with a grip like iron, forcing his head up and tearing his gaze away from the horror show he can't stop watching.

“Don’t look at it. _Look at me_ ,” she snarls, urgent and uncompromising and he does, instinctively, automatically, _gratefully_ , but the noises won't stop.

 

“Bly, breathe. Slowly.”

 

His breath saws rapidly through his nose, he can't get enough air, there's something in his  _ mouth _ he can't he can't he can't

 

“5052 _ , comply. _ ”

 

He's  _ trying.  _ He is. His body isn't responding, something is  _ wrong  _ he can't breathe he can't can't can't can't

 

Another hand comes up around the back of his neck, hauling him up into her space until her forehead impacts his,  _ hard _ , and he can't see anything but her eyes, his entire world unfathomably deep shining brown and the feeling of her breath on his face, slow and even, before the hand on his jaw comes up over his mouth and nose, shoving the gag farther into his mouth and  _ blocking his airways entirely no no no this isn't how decommissioning works no no please no _

His hands claw at hers, yanking at her fingers, her wrists--

 

_ he's not broken he's not he's not please he's not not he's not he just needs air please please no _

 

“5052, stand _ down!” _

 

_ he will he is he will is is yes please yes he's good he's a good soldier he is  please just let him breathe he can't breathe-- _

 

Until suddenly he can, her hand leaving his face enough that he can drag in one long, burning breath before she covers his airways again, forcing him to hold it. 

 

_ Comply -- Survive _

 

He clings to her wrists as she shifts her hand again to let him exhale, to pull in another ragged breath she makes him to hold again, and again, and  _ again,  _ until he dimly notices that she's counting aloud, physically  _ forcing  _ him to breathe on a specific cadence.

Deep, slow breaths that slowly, _far_ too slowly, clear his head. Panic attack, that's what that was. Hyperventilation. Breathing too fast, so he had _too_ _much_ oxygen in his system and it tripped his brain up. He'd needed a hard reset.

Eventually she stops needing to force the cadence and just cradles his head and face in her hands. He follows her slow respiration, her soft voice ticking off the seconds between phases of inhale, hold, exhale until he can finally, shakily let her go, let her pull the nanoprene out of his mouth.

_ Shit _ , so much for not hurting her. There's bands around her wrists that will turn into bruises, shaped like his fingers.  _ Fuck. _

“'M sorry, sir,” he says softly, running his thumb over the darkened skin.

“It's alright, Bly,” she murmurs, and he glares at her until she sighs, because no, it  _ isn't. _

“Either way, I forgive you,” she says, and he'll have to live with that, because she's letting him go, rinsing his blood off her hands and then his face. At least it's  _ just _ blood now. “Now lie back.”

He does, and props his elbows up on the sides of the tub, his hands dangling down towards the fresh rising waterline, resting his head on the back and letting his eyes drift closed again. He keeps the breathing cadence she gave him going in his head. The very tip of her lekku is still tucked into the bend of his elbow, even after all of that.

“I'm sorry too,” she says softly, and he opens one eye slightly to look at her skeptically as she turns him into bacta stew again.  _ Worst  _ part about the scar through his eyebrow: he couldn't cock it as far anymore. Though, having your bucket blasted off could have worse results. “For… that. For using your number, for  _ coercing  _ you, for… I couldn't think of anything else, I... Bly, I…  _ Goddess _ , I am so sorry,you were  _ terrified _ and I couldn't--It felt-- I didn't--ugh _!” _

She drops her head onto her arms and subsequently one of his, her lekku flopping into the stew and onto his chest with a thick  _ splack. _ He winces in sympathetic disgust and carefully lifts them up and out for her, dripping bacta. She makes a  _ blegh  _ face and sighs, wiping them off on a towel that looks plusher than most blankets he's seen. “I know they instilled instinctive obedience to Jedi in you,” she says quietly, staring at her hands, “And I  _ hate  _ that I used it and--”

He shrugs his good shoulder. “Eh. It worked, didn't it?”

“That's not the  _ point _ ,” she starts, and he flicks water at her. Clean, out of the spigot, because he's not  _ that  _ gross.

“Turnabout.  _ Either way, I forgive you. _ ”

He much prefers her scowling at him because he's being an obstinate, self-sacrificing… something in Ryl that roughly translates to having one's head shoved so far up one's own ass that only the lekku tips show. She's making the face that says all of that, rather than looking miserable. It’s much better.He can't remember the exact Ryl phrase but it's great, very pithy and concise. He heard it at 79s a couple times. He'll have to ask her later. Turn it on Senator Mireen maybe.

She sighs again, sounding impossibly tired, more than just physically. “You should eat something,” she says. Looks like he's not the only one that knows when to drop an argument. “If you pass out again, coming out of it on an empty stomach won't do you any favors.”

His turn to sigh, just as tired but more resigned than sad. “Should have a couple packs of paste in my belt,” he says, running a hand over his face.

“ _ Real food. _ ”

Aaaaaand she's back.

“I don't think I'll be able to keep anything else down.” he admits, grudgingly, and she narrows her eyes at him.

“Let me guess, that's all you've eaten in three days, too,” she grumbles, but slaps two of them into his hand anyway.

“Hey now _, that_ is completely understandable,” he argues, tearing one open with his teeth before sticking the whole packet in his mouth and pulling it back out through his teeth to squeeze everything out in one go, just to make her cringe. She _hated_ it when he did that, for reasons she couldn't explain, it apparently just made her skin crawl. Like there was a proper way to eat ration paste. He snickers at her scowl and washes the bland goop down with more water. “The same goes for you too, sir.”

She rolls her eyes and holds up another pack with an “Are you  _ happy _ now?” sort of face, tearing it open. Ooh, also his turn to fuss. See how  _ she  _ likes it.

“That better not be the only thing  _ you’ve  _ eaten in the last three days either,” he growls, and she scowls back at him.

“If it's good enough for you--”

“It's the wrong protein content and it gives you stomach cramps.”

The pseudoamphibian thing carried a lot of pitfalls Requisitions rarely kept track of, like mild sensitivity to certain types of fungal proteins and some sugars, since everyone else in the army could all digest almost anything, thanks again to genetic engineering. (Prime example,  _ he  _ wasn't about to try Kel Dor cooking, but apparently it was great, despite the accurately ominous fumes). She  _ could  _ eat their rations in an emergency, but it didn't mean her guts would like it. She seems a little surprised that he knows about her species-specific dietary issues, but doesn't say anything. He's almost  _ insulted _ , because he  _ has  _ observational skills. Observational skills and a bunch of medics that were  _ quite  _ happy to rat her out on her frequent use of stomach medication because they  _ care about her _ , under guise of worrying that she's compromising her own efficiency.

“Fine. I'll raid the fridge full of food _specially_ _imported_ from Ryloth, _just_ for me, _if_ you promise to take another nap.”

“I will if you will.”

“ _ Nope.  _ You don't get to double down on this, Commander.”

“You take a nap, I have some of the boys corner Mireen and punch him  _ right _ in the dick.”

“ _ Bly!” _

She  _ really  _ wants to say yes, and not entirely for the nap.

“He won't even be able to tell which of us did it! Shit, I could give him a freebie and send Peth squad.”

She's snickering into her arms. “Peth has the entire visual spectrum in hair dye between them, they're hard to miss.”

“Twenty credits says it won't make a damn difference.”

“Neither of us has any money.”

“Well,  _ shit. _ ”

She shakes her head, smiling fondly. “You need to sleep.”

“I will if y--”

“And no nightmares.”

He starts to respond and she pokes him in the forehead.

  
  
  
  



	3. What Am I Supposed To Do With You?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now, to make up for all the medical horror: the porn
> 
> Beta Reader Review:   
> THIS IS THE MOST POETIC WET BATHTUB DREAM AOBUT A HAND JOB EVER

She's petting him again. Did all Twi'leks have a thing for hair? It seemed like it sometimes, as handsy as some of the waitresses at 79s could get, especially with guys who had buzz cuts like him. Something about the texture. They were worse still with the guys who got  _ really  _ into patterned styling. There was a medic in the 501st with  _ lightning bolts  _ shaved in who usually had at least one waitress on his arm idly following the stripes with her fingers.

He doesn't open his eyes this time, because he knows now that she  _ will _ stop the scalp massage and if she's not going to sleep then dammit she can do something simple and pleasant to both of them. Though there is something he needs to address.

“You cheated,” he tells her, shifting a little so his head isn't on his pulsepoint again. Surprising that his hand hasn't fallen asleep yet, but then, it can't have been that long, the water is still warm.

“ _ You  _ didn't have any intention of turning off the sass long enough to sleep,” she counters, but she sounds fond, and her other hand comes up so she can rub at the knots of tension in both his temples. “And before you bring up the negotiations again, your bargain wouldn't work, because now I know that you don't sleep when I do.”

“In the  _ field,  _ no, and it usually works out just fine,” he argues around a contented groan when her fingers move back into his hairline, down to the soft places behind his ears, following the chains of tiny, terrible knots he's carried for longer than he cares to think about.  “'s what watch rotations are for, y’know. Here? Middle of the local military base and behind all the high tech sleenshit that Mireen has doing half the City Guard’s job for them?”

He snaps his fingers, and lets his arm fall to rest along the side of the basin. “Out like a light, don't wake me unless someone’s on fire or something exploded, and then only if it's important to me, personally.”

She snickers, and pushes gently on the back of his head until he sits up a bit, bracing a foot on the far side  of the basin for leverage, and lets his head fall forward so she can get at the base of his skull. And then pulls his other leg in under the warm water because it's cold and he fits now, even if his knees still stick up a little.

“Believe me, if I could do that little trick to myself, I would,” she says, pushing her thumbs into a pressure point until something goes  _ pop _ and a whole section of cervical vertebrae suddenly moves a lot more smoothly when he rolls his head around to look at her backwards and sideways over his shoulder. “I was honestly surprised it worked at all, though I suppose I was just telling your body what it wanted to hear, compounded by the exhaustion.”

“That’ll do a number on willpower, yeah,” he agrees lazily, letting his eyelids drift half-closed again. Hooray for relevant experience via interrogation-resistance training. Though that hadn't been about getting him to sleep. “That and the comfort, security and complete trust.” 

 

She tenses slightly, and changes the subject. Which, yeah, he doesn't blame her. That got weird and introspective. 

 

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I'm dreaming,” he says, with a soft, amused sound. “Can't usually tell, but there's a few giveaways.”

“Oh?”

He sits up farther as he nods, shoulders above the sloped basin so she can work down his neck, tendons like strung rappelling line.

“Don't feel nearly so much like a side of raw butchered bantha,” he explains, rolling his head from side to side under the guidance of her hands. “And, y’know, all of that--”

He twirls a finger in the air, indicating the elaborate suite, then again behind himself, towards her. “All of this. You.”

“Someone caring for you is so hard to believe? You lived it just moments ago.”

“Not with you naked, I didn't.”

He snickers as she looks down at herself.

“Alright, that's fair,” she concedes, and leans forward to drape her arms over his shoulders, crossed at the wrists. He looks away from her again, so she can rest her temple against the side of his head. “I didn't know you liked to think about me naked,” she murmurs.

“To be perfectly candid, sir, I shouldn't let you take point as often as I do. Training has me or one of the boys up front. We're the disposable ones,” he explains matter-of-factly, then shifts a bit so she can see his deliberately mischievous smile. “But you like to lead, and I like the view.”

“I had no idea.”

“Probably because I'm never going to act on it,” he reasons, and leans back against the basin, closer to her. “And I don't want you to know.”

“Oh?” she asks, and her arms bend at elbows to pull him close as she sits up higher on her knees, enough that he can let his head rest on her bare shoulder, her breasts pushed against the back of his. “Why not?”

He snorts. “Short answer? It's not Mission Pertinent Information, and if I were that fuckin obvious about it, I'd deserve the punch in the junk it'd earn me.”

“You  _ really  _ don't like Mireen, do you?” she giggles into his hair. “You don't want to send Peth or  _ anyone _ to 'talk’ to him, you want to handle it yourself.”

“He's a sleazy,  _ rude  _ little cockstain _ ,  _ so yes, I do,” he growls. “Wouldn't be the first time, either, but slugging a Senator would probably get me into a bit more trouble than putting my boot up a few shiny asses.”

She pulls back abruptly, glaring at him. “ _ That's  _ what that fistfight in 79s was about? Defending my  _ honor  _ or something equally pointless?”

“Originally it was hauling Colo and Nexu squads out of a damn dogpile before they got themselves banned,” he explains, looking back at her again, and she is  _ pissed _ . “Heard what started the fight and opted to join in.”

“And that was…?”

He sighs. “Batch of tank-wet idiots out of the 238th decided your choice of attire gave them the right to comment on your sexual proclivities and preferences. Nexu overheard, took offense, and Colo helped.”

“That wasn't necessary, Bly,” she chides, somewhere between stern and resigned. “I can take care of myself.”

“And if you'd been there I'd have let you,” he says, shrugging agreeably. “That's why I haven't introduced Mireen’s stupid, pinched face to the butt of my rifle, and won't without your approval.”

She doesn't have a response for that, and can't stay annoyed at him, not when he's being completely reasonable. She opts instead lean against his upper back, trailing her fingertips over and around the mess of bruising from the aforementioned rifle butt, like if she's careful, she can erase the injury entirely. Maybe she can, here. Every now and then, she loops a little lower, fingertips ghosting across the thick pectoral muscle, following the curve.

“So… This sort of thing is not something you'll let yourself  _ think _ about,” she muses, and shifts a bit to get more leverage, using the heels of her hands to knead the muscles in his chest he hadn't realized were so tight. Stood to reason, if his back was tied up in knots, the rest of him would follow. “But dreams are different, I take it?”

“Pretty sure not even Jedi can control what they dream,” he chuckles, his voice a low, contented rumble in his chest she's never heard before.

“Not entirely, no,” she murmurs against the side of his head, her hands sliding over his chest and along his shoulders, partway down his arms. There's  _ just  _ enough pressure involved for the gesture to be considered therapeutic, but mostly it's about touch, physical contact, just having her hands on him. “Still, all that tightly wound discipline, keeping everything bottled up… I'm a bit surprised it all manifested as something like this.”

“I am a simple man, and I am very, very tired,” he sighs, and tips his head sideways into hers with a smile. “I'll pick you up and screw you stupid against a 'fresher wall halfway out of my armor some other time.”

“Oh  _ really? _ ” she purrs, amused and skeptical and curious.

“Mmn. That or one of those fuckin huge fungus tree things on… Whatsits. Lots of blue, glowing shit.”

“Narq?”

“That's the one. Looked comfortable. Wouldn't end up with splinters in your ass. Good color palette.”

“It  _ was  _ beautiful, wherever it wasn't on fire,” she agrees, drawing up handfuls of clean, warm water up to pour down his chest, following the rivulets down with her fingertips. He had a point. The dark indigo of Narq’s native flora did present a rather striking backdrop for her. The pervasive phosphorescence and ambient energy had reacted strangely with her attunement to the Force until  _ she _ glowed softly too, the faint pale dappling on her hips and lekku standing out sharply. Luckily they hadn't been on any sort of stealth operation, but it had been quite pretty, ethereal even, especially backed by her boys’ solid wall of flat, near-matte white and gold.

“But this isn't that sort of dream, is it,” she asks slowly, more than half rhetorically, hands returning to the taut disaster of overworked muscle between his neck and shoulders, the result of carrying his pack and his weapons and half a transport and later something like two squads worth of wounded troopers back to the medics. “This is the sort where you just lie back and let things happen.”

“Mhm- _ mmnnnnnnglk _ .”

She bursts into giggles when his affirmative ends up drawn out into a sort of gurgling moan, but he's too relaxed to care. She had found another pressure point or  _ something _ that made a whole chain of knots in his neck unravel, and he's fairly certain he's been reduced to the cognitive capacity of a pile of wet string as a result. Therefore he is entirely within his few rights to be surprised when she murmurs  _ Good _ , and tips his head back with her hand under his jaw to kiss him full on the mouth.

At least he rallies quickly, returning the kiss with interest, his shocked vise-grip on the sides of the basin turning into convenient leverage to push himself up and into her kiss, turning slightly. He manages not to laugh at her equivalent surprise--a stunned little  _ oh! _ into his mouth--either at his enthusiasm, his skill or both, but he  _ does _ smirk a little. Hardly the first time he's done this, in general or the just thought of kissing  _ her _ , getting the sweet, plush bow of her top lip between his teeth, his tongue slipping over hers and along her bottom lip after he gently bites that, too.

A good bit of watery bacta sloshes up and out of the basin with him before she pushes him back with hand to his chest, over his racing heart. She's flushed greenish across her cheeks and climbing up the length of her lekku like she's seven shots of vaporator-distilled-moonshine drunk and out of breath and fucking  _ gorgeous  _ with it.

“What about just letting things happen?” she asks, too breathless for it to sound as teasing as she intended, and leans back a bit, out of his reach unless he rolls over. Her hands on his upper chest gently prevent that.

He's left grinning cheekily at her, upside-down and just about eye-level with her  _ spectacular  _ rack. He needs to get his mouth on that too. “Never been good at that. Wasn't designed for it. Men of action, and all.”

Speaking of, she's too far away and he has use of both arms here, his side a dull, distant ache that he can ignore. She takes his hands when he reaches for her, holding them down by her hips and keeping him from catching her around the waist to pull her forward until he can shove his face into her stomach or breasts or anywhere really, he's not picky.

“But you  _ are  _ designed to do as commanded,” she says, twining her fingers in his, bottom lip between her teeth as she takes in the vulnerable stretch of his exposed throat, his chest streaked with water and bacta and bruises, the hard plane of his abdomen just barely obscured by the warm, bacta-clouded water.

“Planning on making me behave,  _ sir?” _ he purrs, his voice dropping into the deep, lazy growl she only knew about through rumors, the way some of them could make themselves sound like an audio distillation of concentrated sex that  _ somehow  _ transcended species barriers.

“No,” she murmurs, running her thumbs in soft circles over his callused palms. “But I will  _ ask  _ you to let me do this.”

He swallows hard, smug grin falling off his face into something quietly stunned, close to awed as she leans forward, tucking her shoulder under his head again so she can run her both her hands down his chest and then farther, the water retreating away from her fingertips as she follows the divot in his abdominals down to his navel. He shudders under her touch like a wary animal when her lips brush his temple as she speaks. “Let me be good to you.”

He wants to tell her that she _is,_ she's so good to him, to all of them, but apparently words are failing him, even inside his head, as he watches her run her fingertips down his body. Her touch is impossibly light, easy enough to mistake for the droplets of water sliding down his chest if he weren't watching it happen. She's so careful not to touch anything important, one arm slung around the back of his neck with her fingertips _just_ above his nipple, brushing lightly against the skin when he breathes. Her other hand is low on his stomach, fingers spread and trailing up and down, over and across, again and again, from the crease of his thigh across his groin, following length of his shaft to the head lying on his opposite hip. She doesn't touch his cock, not even when he twitches _hard_ at the faint scrape of her fingernails on the inside of his thigh, but the way she angles her hand, aligns her fingers _just so_ … is she _measuring?_

He manages to swallow a shaky laugh, biting down on the inside of his cheek to hide his smile in her peripheral, because she's in for a pleasant surprise if that sort of thing matters to her: he's not even completely hard yet, though her teasing hands are quickly remedying  _ that  _ situation. Another light scrape of fingernails, this time up to his navel again that has his hips bucking up into her touch with a loud, thick slosh of diluted bacta that soaks her up to the elbow and splashes up over his chest before she flattens her hand on his hip, pushing him back down.

“ _ Please _ ,” he gasps, turning his face to her neck, breathing her in, her lek falling over the side of his head and onto his chest, half blinding him.

She pulls her hand up his chest, along his throat and his jaw to cradle his head against her collarbone, resting her cheek on his temple. He muffles a long hiss in her skin when she finally touches him, still so,  _ so  _ gentle, a terrible, teasing stroke of just one delicate fingertip up his length, then circling lightly over his slit until his cock twitches up into her hand. He stays still, just barely, abdomen flexing hard to suppress the urge to buck his hips again.

He can feel her soft, pleased hum in her throat as she slowly pets the short fuzz of his hair, holding him close. He shudders in her arms, whimpering when she finally takes his cock in her hand, caressing the head with the whole length of her fingers before she cups it in her palm, then lets it rub against the softness of the inside of her wrist as she strokes him. Slowly,  _ so  _ slowly, her touch still light, a marked contrast to his white-knuckled grip on the sides of the basin, but certainly not teasing anymore. Slow and gentle and  _ thorough _ , he'd told her he was a simple man with simple needs, but that didn't mean she wasn't going to figure out how to take him apart. 

 

What better way to learn how to put him back together? 

 

Running the pads of her fingers up and down his shaft, following the thick vein and taut tendons, has him trembling, shaking with poorly leashed energy and pushing his forehead into the curve of her neck. Her palm cupping the head of his cock when she rolls her wrist as she strokes him makes him pant against her skin, unable to resist rutting up along the soft, wet underside of her forearm with her downstroke, though the attempt only succeeds in teasing him further.

She shifts a bit sideways to give herself more range motion, still cradling his head on her arm, and he leaves a trail of haphazard kisses down the underside of her lek as it falls back behind them, the only part of her he can reach, and she shivers briefly at the sensation.

He's doing so well, holding himself still though he can't relax, not with the curve of his shoulder pillowed on her breasts, and her fingertips drifting farther down to draw idle spiralling patterns around and around the base of his cock and push the water level a little further away with every pass. Worse still is the press of her lips against his temple as she  _ tells  _ him so, praising his control as she carefully cradles his sac in her hand, rolling his balls in her palm, her nails scraping ever-so-gently against the drawn-tight skin.

He very nearly loses said control entirely when her hand drifts lower  _ still _ , curling her fingers to push her knuckles against the sensitive space behind his balls, the pressure enough to make him hiss and swear. His bitten-down nails squeak on the porcelain basin as a precum begins to drip down his length onto his stomach, mixing with the bacta-blue tinted water. She grins,  _ evilly, _ against the side of his head and starts rocking her knuckles against him, keeping her same steady pace but  _ significantly _ upping the intensity, all but milking him and savoring every single broken sound she forces out of him.

“Bit sensitive?” she teases, nuzzling her nose into his hair, fingernails scratching lovingly at his scalp.

“Been a while,” he rasps shakily, chest heaving. “H-haven’t beenn _ nnnnnnhh!” _

He cuts off as she does  _ something  _ down there that makes him see stars, makes his spine curve up and out of the water in a way he shouldn't be able to  _ do _ , as torn up as he is. His dick doesn't seem to care, and the rest of him appears to be of similar opinion, his legs falling open as much as the basin will allow--which is considerably more, now.  

“Been a while since you've done something like this--” she asks, and times the question with a long, firm press of her knuckles against him. It takes a moment for him to settle down again, his hands groping blindly at the walls of the tub, and she waits until he catches his breath to ask the second part, tilting her head to purr directly into his ear. “Or since you've been properly fucked?”

She can very nearly  _ hear  _ his scattered thoughts short-circuit, she  _ doesn't talk like that _ , and she isn't making it any easier for him to process, the pad of a fingertip on his asshole,  _ just  _ enough pressure to make sure he's paying attention but not giving him  _ anything, _ toying with him.

“I-I-It's. _ Ssshit _ . Both. It’s both. I’m. Control ffffffreak. Th-there's not many people I can give that up to, like th-that,” he stammers, breathless and so hard it  _ hurts. _ “Can't with the rank-n-file, ‘cos com-mmand structure, and, and--”,  

 

Fucking hell she's going to kill him at this rate.

 

“--and what if it were me?” she asks softly, and just the  _ idea _ makes him moan, makes his leaking cock twitch, his toes curl under the water. She doesn't need to elaborate but she  _ does,  _ saying things he had to have read out of someone's contraband holonovella or  _ something _ , because it's completely fucking insane for him to think she would talk to him like this. “What if,  _ some other time _ , I screwed  _ you _ stupid? Put that ridiculously oversized bed out there to good use, see if we can't crack the drywall with the headboard?”

The  _ threat _ in her words is contrasted by the softness of her voice and her still so-gentle hands, and he lets go of the basin long enough to wrap his arm up and around her shoulder. He clings to her hard enough that he can feel the pull in his bad side and he doesn't  _ care _ , not as long as she keeps talking, keeps stroking his aching cock  _ just  _ like that, combining all the little tics and tricks and touches she'd learned to  _ wreck  _ him into one long devastating pattern he can only barely predict, his legs braced against the side of the basin to keep himself from snapping his hips up and fucking her hand, ruining her fun.

“You would be so lovely on your knees,” she purrs, and pauses to let him moan when she rolls her thumb over the head of his cock  _ just  _ so, once, twice,  _ three  _ times makes him drip precum all over her hand, perilously close to the edge. She wants him to hear this, to  _ want  _ it. “Stretched out on my bed and waiting for me to harness up and fuck you like I mean it, until you're begging, until you're  _ screaming _ …”

He's past words, now, reduced to short, panting whines as he watches her stroke him so slowly, so sweetly, so at odds with what she's apparently planning to do to him,  _ some other time _ that will never, ever happen but  _ fuck  _ knows he'll be thinking about it for days, weeks, the rest of his fucking  _ life _ , however long or short that may be.

“Do you think I could make you scream? Make you tell the entire barracks how much you love my pretty cock up your ass?”

_ “Hnnnnnyes, yes, ffff-fuck yes--” _

He's still panting his affirmative when he starts to come, when she tucks his head against her chest and wraps her fingers  _ tightly  _ around the base of his cock, keeping him on a razor’s perfect edge for a long, long moment until he breaks again with a wordless, pleading moan into the slope of her breasts that goes on and on and  _ on _ when she finally lets him go, lets him paint her hand and his chest with thick stripes of translucent white cum, sobbing with relief in her arms.

This time when he collapses, it's a good thing, the best thing, to lay breathless and exhausted in her arms, leaning on her shoulder for support. The resultant violent splash of bacta over the sides of the basin didn't leave much to clean themselves off with, but she manages, sluicing him down with her free hand as she continues to hold him against her chest, her cheek on top of his head has he slowly comes down.

Of course, the first thing out of his mouth is complete idiocy, once he does.

_ “'Pretty,’  _ huh?” he mumbles, opening one eye just enough to look skeptically up at her.

“Mhmm,” she answers, and wraps her arm around the front of his shoulders. “Species-neutral, dark blue, and sparkly.”

“Nice.” Apparently dicks could be pretty in the traditional sense of the word. Learned new things every day. Even in wild, incredibly detailed dreams.

She sighs gently, reluctantly letting him go as she gets to her feet. “You should sleep,” she says, running her hand through his hair one last time.

“I am  _ definitely  _ asleep,” he assures her, shifting and rolling up onto his knees, following her movements, leaning on his elbows over the back of the basin. “And I plan to stay asleep for a good,  _ long  _ time.”

“ _ Restful _ sleep,” she starts, then breaks off with a surprised yelp when he  _ lunges  _ forward, catching her around the waist and hauling her off her feet into his arms, her hands braced on his shoulders. “What are you  _ doing?!” _

“Multitasking,” he says, and sets her down on her feet, but keeps his hands on her hips, holding her in place. At least until he decides to move them upwards a bit for a measurement of his own. It turns out that he can, in fact, span her waist in his hands. “I've got the platoon record reload time on my  _ deece,  _ see. I  _ personally  _ take a bit longer than that.” 

 

What is he  _ doing? What is happening?! _

 

He's following the ridges of her hipbones with his thumbs, shifting himself onto his knees until he's half lying flat along the back of the tub, his arms slung up over the edge to keep her still. It puts him at the perfect level to rub his face against her stomach. No, not quite, but it's a good starting point for him to begin feathering kisses down from her navel.

“Thought I might make myself useful until then,” he explains between soft,  _ soft  _ kisses, proving he can be  _ just  _ as terrible as her, if he tries.

“Thing is, I know what I'm looking at, but I never got the simulation on the procedure for this  _ particular _ operation,” he purrs, his hands sliding down her hips to cup her ass, then the backs of her thighs, pulling them gently apart until she instinctively widens her stance to keep her balance. “So do you want to give me a sitrep, or should I work it out on my own?”

He leans in to press a hot, wet kiss to her sex before she can even think to respond, much less do so when he finds something with a different texture than the rest of her, correctly assumes it's important, and kisses  _ that  _ too, grinning up at her when she gasps sharply, shivering.

 

“ _ Bly--!  _ Y-you need to wake up!”


	4. Now That I Know What I Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brief interlude back into gross reality, and then back into banter. Meet the Pilots

What the  _ fuck  _ was that? Besides a shitty time for reality to come crashing back down, fuck. 

 

The ceiling has no answers for him when he blinks at it in confusion. Typical.

 

He's not entirely sure what woke him up, probably some combination of stiff muscles and cold water and kinked back and aching side and the fact that the hard porcelain has put his ass, his arm, and the lower half of the leg he has slung over the side of the basin to sleep. Mother of  _ fuck _ , his… fuck it, his  _ everything  _ hurts. On the plus side, he's in less pain than a few short hours ago, and it’s the kind of pain he's used to, after an Engagement: stiff muscles and bruises and fatigue, not the ominous, entirely unique combination of sensations that he can now recognize as  _ dead, rotting meat literally falling off his body. _

He is going to requisition the absolute  _ fuck  _ out of some heavy-duty bacta and see if he can't talk the medics into breeding more and distributing it to  _ everyone.  _

 

… as soon as he cleans himself off,  _ urgh.  _

 

He sits up and checks his bad side quickly, just long enough to confirm that he's not bleeding, everything is at least soft-scabbed or starting to scar over, muscle fibers slowly regrowing. Amazing stuff, bacta. It will be a  _ nasty _ scar. Civvie medics probably would have slapped some synthskin over it but that’s a luxury they don't have for minor injuries and he'll probably regrow enough of his own with a bacta patch over it for a day or two, with his arm immobilized if he can manage it. He has  _ no  _ interest in repeating any part of the last few hours, including the panic attack, so he's not going to examine the injury for long.

 

… Alright maybe he’d redo the talking and making General Secura laugh and  _ obviously  _ that last part, where three days of insanity culminated in his stress- and stim-addled subconscious taking his dick for one hell of a ride.  _ Damn. _ Where did half of that even  _ come _ from?

Not important, you're sitting in dead diluted bacta, blood, plasma, fear-sweat and an almost embarrassing amount of cum. And there's a congealed film over everything, including you, because it's gone cold.  _ This  _ is why bacta tanks have filters and pumps and heaters and things.

Hey you know what else isn't important? The sudden realization that statistically,  _ someone _ in the GAR has fucked someone else in a bacta tank. Pull the damn stopper already.

 

At least it all rinses off easily enough, helped along by more clean, hot water and an _unreasonably_ soft, thick washcloth off the stack near the far side of the basin. It's almost a shame to more or less ruin something that nice, but then again, it's on Mireen's tab and he probably wipes his ass with the damn things.

So he uses another to wipe down the inside of the basin, because he's not an  _ animal  _ and he's not about to make General Secura or a servant clean up after him. 

 

…  _ especially _ not General Secura, given the nature of some of the mess. Thank  _ fuck _ she had left the room at some point, hopefully immediately after she knocked him out, before he popped off, untouched, in his sleep. Oh fuck, oh  _ Force  _ please let her have left the room, left the damn  _ suite.  _ He drags his fingers over his scalp and laces them behind his neck as he stares at the ceiling. If his  _ asshole  _ bunkmates weren't fucking with him, there was unsettlingly good odds that he hadn't kept what was going on in his head to himself. There were audio clips. The one visual clip was too dark to determine whether or not it was actually him, but  _ someone _ in the 327th had woken said bunkmates up, rutting against a mattress in his sleep.

Fuck it. Not much he can do about it but give the basin and fixtures an extra once-over with the wet cloth after he clambers out, just in case. His knee doesn't particularly want to let him kneel down to wipe up the spilt bacta all over the floor, but he does it anyway, just to make sure he has full range of motion again. Looks like his tibia was just cracked, not broken, or at least it isn't anymore, which amounts to the same thing.

 

The rugs seem to have caught most the mess and subsequently will probably need to be burned, so he bundles them up and shoves them down the laundry chute with the sad remains of his blacks and the sticky used towels. His side is still pissed him, throbbing dully with his breathing and pulling uncomfortably when he twists to the side or reaches too far in any direction. It hurts, but it's not incapacitating anymore, not even when he stands and stretches his arms up above his head, arches his back with a quiet groan. Probably not a good idea to do that, he's definitely still physically compromised, but he's well above the level of function he'd been when he'd staggered in here earlier.

_ Damn,  _ he'd heard that soaking in hot water was good for sore muscles but it wasn't like he'd ever had the opportunity. Come to think of it, General Secura hadn't either, at least for what he'd wager was  _ far  _ too long, and like she'd said,  _ someone _ should enjoy this.

The rugs are shot, so he replaces one with a towel off the same rack as the cloths. Damn thing is thick enough to be a rug anyway, and softer. Another gets wrapped around his hips while the basin fills, and he spots another jar of that ridiculous salt on a shelf.  _ Csillan Cerulean Citrus.  _ Which is apparently Rich People for “it's oranges but  _ blue _ .” Whatever. In it goes, because anything is better than smelling like battlefield and she'd probably feel the same way, wherever the fuck she is.

 

The answer there is apparently “center of the bed, buried in a pile of twisted blanket,” and apparently too tired herself to have done more than peel out of the last of her filthy clothes and wrap herself up in bedding before passing out. On the one hand, good that she was getting sleep, on the other, it wasn't good to sleep off a fight while still wearing the battlefield. It didn't feel like it was really over until you'd hit the medics and then cleaned up. His armor is gone, presumably taken by the same droid or staff that brought her his freshly cleaned helmet, which is lying next to her on its side, plugged into her datapad.

The last thing he wants is to startle her awake, or have her wake up on her own and find him standing mostly naked in her doorway watching her sleep, so he raps gently on the doorframe with his knuckles.

She jumps anyway. The lek outside the blankets bunches up close to her head like a startled snake and the leg she had wrapped around one of the long, oversized pillows draws up to the general vicinity of her chest before her head pops out and she scrambles into a sitting position, shoving the pillow away and flushing darkly. He doesn't comment on any of it. Her sleeping habits aren't his business and it's not like she, their General and a Master Jedi, could tangle up in a pile of friends and brothers and lovers for support.

“Bly, what are you… you're…” she starts, rubbing at her temple with the heel of one hand. The other holds the blankets around her hips.

“Considerably better off, thanks to you, sir," he tells her, and raises his arm level with his shoulder, leaning slightly to the side to show that he can, new tissue grudgingly stretching.

Her head falls forward on an exasperated, exhausted sigh, hands in her lap, a lek falling over her shoulder onto her chest. “Bly, that was the absolute  _ minimum _ of care, you--”

“Will be going back to the medics and then falling into my rack for at  _ least  _ four hours, a full six if I can swing it, sir," he assures her. He probably shouldn't interrupt his General this much but she's looking a little out of it, still a little flushed with sleep and moving slowly. He should let her rest, and therefore get her concerns out of the way quickly.

_ Now _ she makes eye contact, pupils blown wide in the dim light, breaking her slightly dazed gaze off from the vague middle distance of his bare chest to narrow her eyes at him, her mouth a flat line, undoubtedly because she knows he means, “After I check in with all my officers, get a preliminary estimate of GAR damages and casualties, ensure city and planetary defenses are sound, and a whole list of other tasks you'll try to tell me can wait, or do yourself.”

“Anyway, it's your turn,” he says. Dammit, his towel is falling off. Her eyes snap open wide, darting to his hands as he fixes it and then back up to his face.

“Wh...What?”

He has  _ got  _ to learn lekku-sign. They both went completely straight, pointing down, which he  _ thinks  _ is confusion/question, but then the tip of the one hanging down the center of her chest curled up, and up is good?

“Cleaned the bathtub out and filled it up for you, sir," he explains. What'd she expect, that he'd just leave a mess? He's almost insulted. “You said I run a little hotter than you, right? So it's just warm, to me, but should be about right for you, I think.”

“ _ Oh.  _ Oh. Uhm. Thank you,” she says, and grabs the chattier of her lekku in both hands, holding it against her chest. He's going to stop paying attention to what either lek is doing. The very tip of it had started up some sort of repetitive gesture: pointing towards him and then curling up and back towards herself, but apparently their unrestricted activity made her uncomfortable. More than one way to be naked, wasn't about clothes, but either way, he's intruding.

“Thank  _ you, _ sir,” he counters, and immediately falters. “For. Uhm. This. Everything. It was nice. You. I mean… within the circumstances, it… Not the bad parts but...”

 

shut up shut up  _ shut up _

 

“I should go.” Go  throw yourself out an airlock is what you should go  _ do.  _ Turn around before she sees you blushing and asks questions,  _ dumbass. _

 

There's the  _ flumph  _ of a body hitting a mattress as he leaves, completely understandable, because fuck if he isn't relieved that conversation is over too. He gives himself a minute to lean back against her doorway in the hall and catch his breath, marvelling at his own spectacular idiocy.

_ It was nice _ fuckssakes what is  _ wrong  _ with you?!  _ Move  _ before someone sees you.

 

“Oh  _ shit _ , no way!”

“ _ Yeah _ way, dude! It happened!”

“Oh  _ shit! _ ”

“ _ It finally fuckin happened!” _

 

Too late.

 

He has just enough time for his own mental “Oh shit” of a decidedly less excited inflection before he's tackled from behind with a clattering jingle of loose flightsuit. He stays on his feet, barely, but the offender is undeterred, wrapping both bare, wiry arms around his neck and ruffling his hair with an exuberant whoop.

“ _ So fuckin proud of you, man!” _ is yelled into his ear while the absolute hell is pummeled out of his shoulder by someone else, another pilot with the long sleeves of his flightsuit tied around his hips like an asshole and the Republic Cog shaved into the left side of his head. That's Gunner, out of Avril Flight, so the monkeylizard on his back is Mids.

Another sharp jab to his shoulder, and “ _ Damn,  _ boss! We heard General Secura brought you back for some  _ special treatment _ but  _ damn!” _

“Sure as shit didn't expect you to just swagger out her quarters in your  _ skins  _ when she finally took you for a spin, neither!” Mids crows, still dangling down his back.

He catches Gunner's fist in his hand on the next swing.

“I am going to say this once: Shut the fuck up, nothing happened.”

Gunner, because he's an  _ ass _ , cracks up. “Says the barefoot, bareassed guy doing the Walk Of Shame!”

“More like Walk Of  _ Fame _ , am I right?!” Mids howls, because he has one volume setting and it occupies  _ all _ of his few remaining braincells not scrambled by G-forces.

Alright that's enough. This is going to hurt,  _ but _ it's necessary. He grabs onto Mids’ arms, and rolls his shoulders forward, hard and fast, to flip the pilot over his head and slam him ass first down onto the duracrete floor. Not as hard as he  _ could  _ have, but enough to make his point.

“You. Are. Wrong,” he growls, low and ugly, leaning down into the pilot’s face.

“Aw,  _ dammit, _ ” Mids whines, unrepentant, but he has the smarts to stay down.

Gunner shakes his head, arms crossed over his chest. “ _ You _ are full of shit, sir.”

“You want to try that again, airman?” he growls, standing up. He  _ might  _ deliberately loom a bit, but what's the point of having extra height if you don't use it?

Gunner's hands immediately snap up in a gesture of surrender. “Sir, I'll believe that there wasn't any Equipment Testing going on, maybe not even an Inspection, but  _ something  _ happened.”

“The  _ fuck _ are you talking about?” What does he know? How __ does he know?!

“Dunno. Something in  _ there _ , though,” Gunner says, and pokes him in the chest, right over his heart.

It takes more effort than he'd like to admit not to look down and make absolutely sure she didn't leave a handprint, a scratch on his chest, something. (She didn't, he checked earlier)

“You leave your mask off outside atmo again or something?”

“Don't fight it, Commander. Guns just  _ knows  _ shit sometimes,” Mids pipes up from the floor, now laying with his hands behind his head, legs crossed at the ankles like he meant to be down there at the first place. “Seriously though, it'd be a good thing. You've got our support.”

“Pfft. Obvs.  _ Wingmen _ . Duh,” Gunner scoffs.

He rolls his eyes and offers Mids a hand up. “You idiots are  _ too  _ supportive. Of  _ everyone.” _

“No such thing, sir," Gunner argues, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his flightsuit as he walks, just to show off that he gets  _ pockets _ .

“Yeah? How about letting your batchmate pick a fight in a civvie bar, get _literally chewed on_ and then fucked in a filthy bathroom?” he growls, something he's been meaning to bring up to Avril for a _while_ , and conveniently steering the conversation away from himself. “I _know_ about Anomaly, fuckass.”

Anomaly wasn't  _ in  _ Avril, but they'd halfway adopted him when the mutie had lost his Flight to a possibly deliberate strategic fuckup years ago.

Mids shrugs, hands in  _ his _ pockets, and says, “Dude’s got a fuckload of bad noise up in his thinkmeats. Gotta get that out somehow.”

“There's worse ways,” Gunner adds, and mimes a pistol to the temple. “We kept an eye on him, sir."

Well this was going nowhere. He gives up. “Look, I don't need the rumormill on this. Keep it down, keep it tame, alright?”

Ordering them was pointless, it would get out from the security cameras and word-of-mouth from the medical tent and everyone on the entire damn base that watched him stagger along in General Secura’s wake, but maybe he could do damage control, keep  _ this  _ part out of it, and thankfully they both nod.

“Want to find some blacks so the rest of the base doesn't get the same idea we did?”

“No Gunner, I'd like to continue being one light breeze away from showing off my lower deck cannon,” he deadpans, and both pilots crack up, leading him to the closest Requisitions office.

 

\---

 

Later, halfway into a clean top, he stops suddenly, the hair on the back of his neck standing up.

“Commander? What's wrong?” Gunner asks, cocking his head from where he's leaning against the doorway.

“You ever get that feeling like… like you  _ know  _ someone is thinking about you?” he asks, and pulls the sleeves up over his shoulders.

“Sure. Every time Mids jacks off,” Gunner replies, shrugging easily.

“ _ Dude. Not cool.” _

“Don't lie, you know the only reason you can't find a good man is cos you're thirsty for my ass,” Gunner yells over his shoulder at his wingman.

“Sleen _ shit,  _ dicknuts. You're the thirsty one. You know you want me,” Mids yells back.

“You're  _ pilots _ , neither of you have asses,” he says, rolling his eyes. Apparently, for all their matchmaking, neither of them had figured out that yeah, the reason they could never find the right guy was because they'd already  _ found  _ him.

“ _ Harsh,  _ sir.”

“ _ Way  _ harsh. Anyway, why do you ask?”

He shakes his head. “No reason.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...did I leave enough hints towards what the next chapter is going to be?


End file.
